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Fadi Quran is the face of the new Middle East. He is 23, a graduate of
Stanford University, with a double major in physics and international
relations. He is a Palestinian who has returned home to start an
alternative-energy company and see what he can do to help create a
Palestinian state. He identifies with neither of the two preeminent
Palestinian political factions, Hamas and Fatah. His allegiance is to
the Facebook multitudes who orchestrated the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak
in Egypt and who are organizing nonviolent protests throughout the
region. In the Palestinian territories, the social-networking rebels
call themselves the March 15 movementand I would call Quran one of
the leaders of the group except that it doesn't really have leaders yet.
It is best described as a loose association of "bubbles," he says, that
hasn't congealed. It launched relatively small, semisuccessful protests
in the West Bank and Gaza on the aforementioned March 15; it is staging
a small, ongoing vigil in the main square of Ramallah. It has plans for
future nonviolent actions; it may or may not have the peaceful throngs
to bring these off.

I meet with Quran and several other young Palestinians at the local
Coca-Cola Bottling Co. headquarters in Ramallah, which tells you
something important about this movement: we are not meeting in a mosque.
I've known one of them, Fadi El-Salameen, for five years. He was an
early volunteer for the Seeds of Peace program, which intermingled
Palestinian and Israeli teenagers at a summer camp in Maine. In recent
years, El-Salameen has spent much of his time in the U.S. and has
achieved a certain prominencehe is quietly charismatic, a
world-class networker, the sort of person who is invited to
international conferencesbut he is now spending more time at home
in Hebron, organizing the March 15 movement in the West Bank's largest
city. "I met some of the leaders of the Tahrir Square movement at a
conference in Doha," he tells me. "They don't fit the usual profile of a
'youth leader.' They are low-key, well educated but not wealthy. They
are figuring it out as they go along, trying to figure out what works." (See "Growing Up Palestinian in the Age of the Wall.")

The young Palestinians don't seem as pragmatic as all that; they are
somewhere beyond wildly idealistic. "The goal is to liberate the minds
of our people," says Najwan Berekdar, an Israeli-born Arab who is a
women's-rights activist. "We want to get past all the old identitiesFatah, Hamas, religious, secular, Israeli and Palestinian Arab and create a mass nonviolent movement." Berekdar has touched on an idea
that might prove truly threatening to Israelis: a "one state" movement
uniting Palestinians on both sides of the current border. But the young
Palestinians have not focused on anything so specific. Their current
political plan is to go back to the futureto achieve Palestinian
unity by resurrecting and holding elections for a body called the
Palestinian National Council, which took a backseat after the Oslo
accords created the Palestinian Authority and its parliamentary
component. This seems rather abstrusethe basic rule for
people-power movements is, Organize first, bureaucratize later  and
it would be easy to dismiss these young people as hopelessly naive but
for two factors. The first is that they've seized the Palestinian
version of a suddenly valuable international brand: the Tahrir Square
revolution. "We cannot discount their importance," a prominent Israeli
official told me. "Not after what happened in Egypt." (See "In the West Bank, An Economy Without a Nation.")

But equally important are their methods. Ever since Israel won control
of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, the Palestinian national movement has
been defined by terrorism, intransigence and, until recently in the West
Bank, corruption. It has never been known for dramatic acts of
nonviolence. "If they'd been led by Gandhi rather than Yasser Arafat,
they would have had a state 20 years ago," Kenneth Pollack of the Saban
Center at the Brookings Institution told me. Israeli officials
acknowledge that the recent, peaceful economic and security reforms led
by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad have been the most effective
tactics the Palestinians have ever used in trying to create a state. But
they haven't gotten the Palestinians anywhere in their negotiations with
the equally intransigent Israeli government. Jewish settlements continue
to expand on Palestinian land. A mass nonviolent movement might tip the
balance, especially if the worldincluding the Israeli public began to see Palestinians as noble practitioners of passive resistance
rather than as suicide bombers.

The Israeli leadership is as perplexed as everyone else about what the
revolutionary tide in the region will bring. Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu has said he'd prefer dealing with democracies, but he isn't so
sure that the Tahrir Square movement will yield a democracy in Egypt
(and there are already indications that Egypt's new government will push
harder for a Palestinian peace accord than Mubarak ever did). Netanyahu
has wisely called for a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, an idea that
the Saudiswho seem to agree with the Israelis on practically
everything these dayshave also quietly endorsed. "If you can't get
the young Egyptians involved in big public-works projects, like new
housing, which is badly needed," an Israeli intelligence expert told me,
"then they're back in the square for sure, only they'll be supporting
the Muslim Brotherhood this time."

That seems unduly pessimistic. The Facebook rebels may have more
influence on the suddenly antiquated Islamists than vice versa; if there
is Shari'a, it will come with alternative-energy start-ups and a
Coca-Cola chaser. "You have to wonder what sort of influence this
revolution has had on Hamas," a Palestinian Christian said to me. "Are
they watching al-Jazeera and seeing nonviolence succeed where terrorism
has failed?" (See "In the West Bank: A Visit With a Soon-To-Be Ex-Negotiator.")

The Israelis assume not, which seems a safe assumption: Hamas rule in
Gaza is going well, despite the Israeli boycott. "The Hamas military
wing is making money off the smuggling from the tunnels [from
Egypt into Gaza]," a West Bank businessman tells me. "They sell my
product for twice my price. And yet the standard of living is rising in
Gaza." In fact, Hamas seems more secure right now than Fatah, despite
the economic successes in the West Bank. Palestinian President Mahmoud
Abbas has been wounded by the leak to al-Jazeera of private memos that
showed Palestinian negotiators making what seemed to be major
concessions to the Israelis. In order to restore some of his
credibility, Abbas has been reaching out to Hamas, raising the prospect
of a reconciliationand destroying any slim hope of an accord with
the Israelis. "Abbas has to choose," a Netanyahu aide told me, "between
Hamas and us."

So the stalemate continueswith one exception: the March 15
movement and the rush of history in the region. The young activists may
be preoccupied by the chimera of Palestinian unity at the moment, but
what happens if they turn their full attention to the Israeli
occupation? What happens if they begin to organize marches to protest
the near daily outrages perpetrated by Jewish settlers? What if they
stage sit-down strikes to open roads that are used by settlers but
closed to Palestinians? What if they march 10,000 strong against a
settlement that is refusing Palestinians access to a traditional water
supply? "If it is nonviolent, then that means, by definition, it is
civilized," an Israeli official said. "We have no problem with that."
But what if the Palestinians are nonviolent and the Jewish settlers are
not? "I think about the dogs unleashed on Martin Luther King in
Birmingham," Quran says. "I think about the beatings. That's what it
took for Americans to see the justice of his cause. We will be risking
our lives, but that is what it takes. I only hope that we're not too
well educated to be courageous."